


in nomine matris

by gaywoodandbine



Series: episode codas [5]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Angst, Episode: s03e15 To the Night Children, Episode: s03e15 To the Night Children Coda, Gen, Hurt Magnus Bane, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Maryse Lightwood, Post-Episode: s03e15 To the Night Children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-03-30
Packaged: 2019-12-26 18:51:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18288179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gaywoodandbine/pseuds/gaywoodandbine
Summary: Maryse would burn the world down to protect Alec from this if she could.





	in nomine matris

**Author's Note:**

> Here, have some Lightwood feels.

When Maryse was a young girl, naïve and hopeful for the future, she fell in love with a boy. He was called Henry, and he was beautiful and kind and held an unwavering faith about the world that she admired, at the time. His last name was of little consequence to her, but it had mattered a great deal to her parents. 

Her older brother already sullied the Trueblood legacy by leaving the ranks of the Nephilim to marry a mundane. They would not allow her to enter into a family that was of a lower social standing than her own and ruin her future. Maryse Trueblood would do great things with her life, and the high expectations set for her did not include a marriage unworthy of her potential. 

She hated them for it. Resented the control they exerted over her life and her choices, but she had done what was asked of her, ending it despite how it broke her heart to do so. Nothing else came before family, before duty, not even the love of a good man. 

In those moments, she hated her brother, too. She hated him for his bravery in choosing a life of his own making. She hated him for letting himself fall for someone so different, so alien to who they were. Maryse hated him for leaving her alone in this. 

She never saw Henry again. 

Years later when she was no longer a Trueblood but a Lightwood and pregnant with a little boy who held so many of her hopes and dreams, she heard along the Idris grapevine that Henry was dead. He was sent to some faraway Institute halfway across the world and was fatally wounded in battle. It was the best any Shadowhunter could hope for, an honorable death in service of the Angel. It was a cold comfort, and it did not stop the lump forming in her throat or the stinging in her eyes. She took a moment to mourn that beautiful idealistic boy she once loved, the loss of youthful innocence, and then she straightened her spine and was a Lightwood again. 

Maryse has so many regrets they could fill an ocean, but in the end, as much as it hurt, letting Henry go could not be one of them. If she had rebelled against her family’s wishes as Max had done, she would never have been given four wonderful children who have not lost their light no matter how she or the world has tried to snuff it out. She would not have found the possibility of love in another good man. 

For all of the terrible things that she has done, there have been miracles made of some of them. 

Maryse is not a perfect woman. She is not a perfect Shadowhunter. _Wasn’t_. She will freely admit that she hasn’t always been the best parent, either. It is a difficult thing to walk the line of commanding officer and mother, and she knows she didn’t balance it well, expected perfection of her sons and daughter when she wasn’t willing to give it herself. There was a time when she had hoped they would fix the mistakes she made.

But she has only ever wanted what is best for them. To see them safe and whole. Happiness had not always been a priority so long as they had the tools they needed to survive in the world they lived in, one that could be cruel and rigid and took a vile kind of pleasure in condemning those who were different. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that she realizes how very much like her own parents she became. 

As she has grown older, she understands more and more why they did what they did. They were wrong, just as she was, but she can’t deny that they had acted in a way they thought was right to protect her, no matter how they had wounded her in trying. It doesn’t make it better, but it has helped her learn to _be_ better for the time she has left, to mend the relationships with Alec and Isabelle and Jace and Max before it’s too late.

Watching her eldest son sitting as still as a statue in the infirmary, she can feel those old wounds break open again. His back, usually straight and strong with a spine of steel, is bowed with the weight of worry. His eyes are fixed on his hands where they rest in his lap. He looks defeated in a way she’s never seen him. 

Alec lifts his head at the sound of her heels clicking on the tile floor as she approaches, and he turns to look at her. 

“Oh, sweetheart,” she breathes out, a wobble in her throat at the hurt in his eyes.

She would burn the world down to protect him from this if she could. 

He’s been holding himself together with the smallest of threads, she knows. Her boy puts his own emotions aside to be the rock that the people around him need him to be. It makes him a good leader, but it costs him a piece of his heart. Now though, at the sight of her, his face crumples, tears welling up and spilling over.

“Mom.”

His voice is broken, pleading, her little one begging for someone to fix this, and she wraps her arms around him, letting him bury his face against her stomach like he did when he was still small enough to do so. She strokes her fingers through the mess of his dark hair and shushes him, swaying slightly side to side. 

There is a saying, overly romantic for a race of people who tend to suppress their emotions, that Shadowhunters love, truly love, only once, and whether that’s to be believed or not, she knows deep down that Magnus is it for Alec. 

She had fought against it with all the force of a mother desperately trying to ensure a bright future for their child in any way she could, not noticing that she was quietly killing the person Alec very much deserved to be. But he’d refused to stand down, determined to make his own choices and pave his own way. He’s more like her brother than she realized. Alec is stronger than she ever was, and she’s so proud of the man he’s become. She only wishes she could spare him this pain. 

Alec pulls away to look up at her, eyes red-rimmed with tears tracks down his face, expression so lost that she feels the tell-tale prickle at her own eyes. 

“He’s dying. I don’t know what to do. I can’t fix it.”

She strokes his hair back off his forehead, voice as soothing as she can make it, “We’ll figure out a way.”

“I can’t lose him.”

Maryse shakes her head, cupping his face in both hands and making him look at her, “You listen to me. You are not going to lose him. Magnus is not going to leave you. We will figure out a way.”

He nods, but he still looks haunted, attention slowly drawn to the bed again. She lets him go, staying quiet at his side, a hand rubbing circles into his back. 

Magnus Bane is still and small in the infirmary bed beside them. It’s wrong to see him like this, hair lying flat, free of the makeup he usually wears and dressed in a drab blue infirmary gown. Centuries old and he looks achingly young, barely older than Alec. Magnus is a man full of life and movement, and save for the shallow rise and fall of his chest with each breath, he looks too close to death’s door.

Magnus can’t die. If she has to call down Raziel to give him back, she will find a way to do it. Her baby boy does not deserve to feel the grief of love lost this young. 

She looks at this immortal being who took her son’s heart and protected it like his own, and feels a wave of pain and love for him. She’s sure he’d laugh if he could see inside her head, right now, Maryse Lightwood – Maryse Trueblood - ready to go to war to save him if she must. But like it or not, Magnus Bane is one of her own, now, too. He was the second he chose to reach out to Alec and love him like he deserved.

And Maryse protects her own.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on [tumblr](http://gaywoodandbine.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/gaywoodandbine) if you'd like to come find me


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